Tag: Mainstream

The Lioness

I hadn’t intended to turn yesterday’s post on ‘woman staring into middle distance with man at her feet’ into a series, but then I spotted this image in my queue and couldn’t resist. The lady encouraging the man back into the pool is the great Catherine Deneuve, famous for her roles as (to quote wikipedia) aloof, mysterious beauties. This looks like a fashion magazine shot, but I’m not exactly sure for what. From zooming into the text it looks like it was photographed by Ellen Von Unwerth in NYC in 1999.

lioness

Shoe shopping

I don’t normally go for the ‘woman stares off into middle distance with supercilious air while man grovels around near her feet doing something to her shoes / feet’ type of porn. That may sound like a weirdly specific fetish, but it actually seems to be a pretty common femdom image.

That said, there are always exceptions, and this is one of them. Not entirely sure why it’s an exception, but it does work for me. Possibly because it’s actually a mainstream shot for Sara Navarro shoes, rather than being a posed femdom porn shot. This was part of a show in Madrid presenting the new Sara Navarro collection for 2015. Apparently she’s the only design who “makes scented shoes for women, a sensorial experience unique in the world.” Shoes and scent is certainly a popular combination for some kinky people, although I’d guess most submissives prefer a more au naturel aroma.

saranavarro

Little Moments

When I first encountered this I wasn’t sure if I was looking at femdom, a peice of performance art or acrobats practicing for an all new all nude Cirque du Soleil show. It turns out to be one photographs from a series called Little Moments by photographer AdeY. The images in the series are designed to…

…depict imbalances evident in contemporary society today by directly addressing issues of gender, normative behaviour and how society forces us to choose one direction or path. The subjects show our venerability, loneliness, strengths and expectations whilst highlighting the correlation between body and space.

You can see other images from the series here. Not the typical kind of shots I feature here, but I do think they’re interesting.

alittlemoment

Dark Circus

This interview with film director Julia Ostertag caught my eye today. She has a new movie coming out called Dark Circus, which features a lot of fetishistic and kinky themes. Judging from the trailer it looks to be the kind of twisted surreal art movie that I used to love as a student, but don’t seem to have the patience for these days. I mention it here for what the director said in the interview about filming one of the group scenes.

I really liked how there was one girl, a real poster beauty who I’d never seen before, and she said, “I’d really like to beat up a man, but not with a whip, with my bare fists. Would that be possible?” and I said, “Well, I’m sure we can find someone” And we did! There was someone, a sub, already tied to a chair wanting to be punished by his mistress and she joined them and hit him with her bare fists. You can see it in the ritual scene towards the end! I liked that energy!

My first thought was ‘What a lucky submissive’. My second thought was ‘I really hope the mistress supervised that.’ Punching someone correctly can be tricky. Get it wrong and it can be bad for both the puncher and the punchee. Although if I was the sub, I’d probably have taken the chance. Hopefully the poster beauty in question discovered her inner domme in the process.

punchedIn the context I discovered this image – a femdom blog surrounded by femdom porn – I original assumed it was particularly artistic shot of aftercare from a scene. In fact I now think it’s a shot from a TV series about boxing called Lights Out that originally aired on FX back in 2011.

Better than yoga?

Articles on BDSM and mindfulness have been popping up across the web in recent days. The first I spotted was at Time magazine, and since then I’ve seen similar articles at sites like Bustle, Instinct Magazine and Medical Daily. They were triggered by research published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness that claimed that BDSM could put people in a state of ‘flow’, where the rest of the world falls away and their concentration is heightened on the present moment.

It’s good to see positive BDSM stories on mainstream sites, and I doubt many people in the kinky world would dispute the idea of BDSM leading to altered mental states. Getting into subspace might not be the only reason people play, but it’s often an important one. That said, I do have problems with the study (as it’s described in the mainstream press)…

  1. They only picked 7 couples, which is a tiny number to study. On top of that, the couples had a variety of relationship states (from long term to just met), introducing more variables into the tiny sample.
  2. They randomly assigned top/bottom status. If everyone involved was a switch that might be OK, but if not, then it would seem very problematic. Ask me to top someone and you will not get mindfulness. You’ll get anxiety, stress and a partner stuck in a tangled web of granny knotted ropes. Switching for non-switches is not a good measure of normal BDSM play.
  3. It doesn’t appear that they distinguished between top and bottom space. I’m not an expert on top space, but from what I’ve read it seems quite different to bottom space. Both have elements of being in the moment and the rest of the world falling away. However, top space seems to be about concentration and focus, a sense of mastery that aligns with the more traditional ideas of mindfulness and flow. Bottom space, for me at least, is not like that at all. It’s about not thinking clearly, surrendering to the moment and disassociating. I hear tops describe their state as having heightened intuition and understanding, where I can barely form words when deep in bottom space.

Hopefully the study will at least be a good starting point for further research. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with an image of a couple in their own particular state of flow. From the watermark I assume it was something to do with this event (I found it here).

flow

United colors of kink

The image put me in mind of the Italian fashion house Benetton. Back in the 90’s they were famous for doing both colorful and controversial advertisements under the banner ‘United Colors of Benetton’.  The bright colors were very much part of the fashion of the time, and while using controversial imagery to attract attention isn’t exactly new, they pushed it further than most.

Sadly this never graced a billboard. It’s actually a work by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari for a biannual art magazine they do called (appropriately enough in this case) Toilet Paper. This particular image, called Sit on my Face, was part of a collection shot for Vice.

sit-on-my-face

Getting it all wrong

When a story about a dominatrix avoiding jail after a client died in a session originally surfaced in my inbox, I was pleased. Not for the dead guy obviously, but for the fact that she hadn’t been unreasonably punished. From just reading the article title I assumed he’d had a heart attack or aneurysm and gone out doing something he enjoyed. Intense kinky sex can certainly raise stress and blood pressure levels, and having a play partner die would be traumatizing enough without adding legal entanglements. Now, having read the story, I’m not so sure. Jail seems like a pretty reasonable place for her.

The client contacted her to do breathplay, which is a reasonable thing in itself. The badness starts with him wanting to be made unconscious. It gets worse with the fact she agreed to do it when clearly neither of them had a clue what they were doing. It culminates with her helping him use tape and a noose to cut off his breathing and then leaving him alone in a hotel room for 30 minutes. Leaving someone alone is a big red flag in most bondage situations, let alone when breathing restrictions are involved. Stupidity like that really deserves some prison time, even if he was equally idiotic in instigating the situation.

Personally, I love breathplay. I’ve had some of my most intense sessions while experiencing it. But it was always with people who knew what they were doing, who kept a very close watch on my physical responses and where we could escape it in a second or two.

breathplayThis is the lovely Mistress Eleise – someone who definitely does know how to do breathplay properly. A gloved hand can be very effective all on its own. This is taken from her Femme Fatale Films.

The shape of things to come

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about female anatomy and was a bit snooty about those who demonstrated a lack of knowledge in said anatomy. Having read this article on a 3D printed model of a clitoris, I should perhaps have been slightly more forgiving. If I’d been handed the model, I’m not sure I’d have instantly known what it was. Much like an iceberg, a lot of interesting stuff lies below the visible part. The printed model is going to be used to teach French school children, which is simultaneously an excellent idea and very French.

Here’s a shot of a guy getting his own close-up anatomy lesson. I can’t see his face, but something tells me they’re both enjoying it.

closeup

Healsluts

It’s a well known fact that people will figure out ways to inject sex and kink into almost any possible situation. If people like X and people like sex, so how much better would X+sex be?

The latest example of this is a type of online videogame known as shooters and, as this article explains, one specific one known as Overwatch. Characters typically play as either destructive ‘tanks’ (taking and dishing out damage) or healers (helping the tanks stay alive). So some kinky gamers have created a D/s dynamic with the tanks as dommes and the healers as service submissives. The game is still played in the normal way as a shooter, but the dynamic is overlaid onto the player interactions. The article makes some pretty broad and possibly inaccurate generalizations about BDSM terminology, but it seems to capture the spirit of the thing pretty well.

Personally I’m not much of a fan of multi-player shooters. I prefer games with complex plots that I can play with a glass of wine in hand. But I do admire the ingenuity of people who liked the game and figured out how to mix D/s into it.

Unfortunately not ever combination of D/s and videogames is so ingenious. This is an incredibly dumb advert from the 90’s. It’s from the time when the people developing the ads had no idea about games, and therefore simply threw together whatever random elements they thought would appeal to teenage boys.

ssg14

Lady parts

According to a recent study, 50% of British women can’t identify their reproductive parts on a diagram. That seems a bizarrely high number. I’ve no idea how accurate this study is, but it would explain a pet peeve of mine: Erotic fiction that gets all the body parts wrong when it starts describing the details of an encounter. There’s nothing like a vagina being licked or a cervix penetrated to ruin a steamy story. I remember one particularly strange example that seemed to think the female protagonist had a prostate. That would have come as a bit of a shock to her gynecologist.  I always assumed it was male authors not having a clue, but maybe it’s a more widespread problem than that.
oralHopefully the gentleman above knows exactly where he’s sticking his tongue. The image is signed AD, but I don’t have a better attribution than that. Amusingly, when I do a Google reverse image search it suggests that the image is about “Delayed onset muscle soreness”. Maybe she’s had him there for a while?